Personality Theory and the Nature of Human Nature

People are the deadliest invasive species in the history of the earth. People have the potential to kill every living thing and, in certain instances have already done so (e.g. passenger pigeon, western black rhinoceros, great auk) or are on their way to doing so (e.g. sea turtle, elephant, tiger, polar bear). Given their frightful potential and worldwide presence, it would be useful to know something about people. Personality psychology is the “go-to” discipline for understanding people; personality psychology is the only discipline whose primary focus is the nature of human nature. What does personality psychology tell us about human nature? The answer depends on whom you ask, or more precisely, to which personality theory you subscribe.

Keep reading to learn more about the history of personality theory, different theoretical approaches, and the role of personality in organizational and leadership performance.

History of Personality Theory

Modern personality psychology began in Vienna at the end of the 19th century, where an amazing flowering of human creativity brought revolutions in a wide variety of fields including architecture, music, physics, medicine, music, painting, literature, economics, and especially philosophy. Personality theory started as a psychodynamic version of psychiatry—mental illness was hypothesized to be a function of intrapsychic dynamics and the physical symptoms were secondary. The pioneers of this new way to conceptualize psychic troubles included Pierre Janet (who was French), Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Erik Erikson, and others. Personality theory was a vibrant intellectual activity for 70 years but by the early 1970s, some prominent personality psychologists began to argue that personality theory was pointless, that only data mattered. In retrospect, Walter Mischel’s (1968) critique of personality psychology was more a symptom of the decline of personality theory than a cause—it reflected a changing culture rather than creating one.

The collapse of interest in personality theory created a hole in our ability to understand human affairs. This is because personality theory is unavoidable: everything we do depends on our assumptions about human nature. Even social psychology depends on (often untenable and unspecified) assumptions about human nature. We need to make these assumptions explicit for two reasons:

• ideas have consequences—they drive everything we do;
• knowledge proceeds more efficiently from error than from confusion—bad ideas can be corrected, but unspecified assumptions lead to futility.

Types of Personality Theory – three major theories of personality

1. Psychodynamic Theory

Psychodynamic theory dominated personality psychology for 70 years and contains many valid insights. For example, early experience shapes later personality, much social behavior is unconsciously motivated, people are inherently irrational, and psychology can be used for human betterment. The three major assumptions of psychodynamic theory are:

• everyone is somewhat neurotic;
• the goal of life is to overcome one’s neurosis;
• the goal of personality assessment is to identify the sources of one’s neurosis.

The problem with psychodynamic theory is the first assumption – everyone is not neurotic. Although most people have issues that bother them from time to time, to be neurotic is to be dysfunctional on a continuing basis and that is obviously not true for most people. In addition, as positive psychology points out, the absence of neurosis does not guarantee happiness or success. Lastly, diagnosing psychopathology is not the primary goal of personality assessment. Despite its compelling subject matter, psychodynamic theory pointed personality psychology in the wrong direction for 70 years. Positive psychology (Seligman, 2002) is a superficial, but natural, reaction to the excesses of psychodynamic theory.

2. Trait Theory

The goal of trait theory is to classify the structure of personality; the units of analysis are “traits,” defined as (a) recurring behavioral tendencies; and (b) neuropsychic structures.

Trait theory makes three major assumptions:

• everyone has traits;
• the goal of life is to discover one’s traits;
• the goal of personality assessment is to measure traits.

Despite the immense popularity of trait theory in modern psychology, it has limited utility as a personality theory for several reasons; here we will mention three:

• trait theory describes behavior in terms of traits, and then explains behavior in terms of traits. This is a tautology—as Walter Mischel (1968) pointed out long ago.
• the search for the neuropsychic structures that explain the consistencies in behavior is a worthy project, but it is a project for neuro-scientists, not personality psychologists
• the accepted taxonomy of traits, the Five-factor model (Wiggins, 1996), is based on ratings of school children in Hawaii (Digman, 1963) and Air Force enlisted men in Texas (Tupes & Crystal, 1961). Trait theory has in fact produced an common language for describing the reputation of others and identified a replicable structure underlying the trait terms.

3. Interpersonal Theory

The goal of interpersonal theory is to understand how people interact with others and how those interactions influence subsequent interactions. Interpersonal theory makes three major assumptions:

• almost everything consequential in life occurs during social interaction, or as part of preparation for future social interaction;
• the goal of life is to find and retain a productive place in one’s social network,
• the goal of personality assessment is to describe and predict how people will behave in social interactions.

Interpersonal theory differs from trait and psychodynamic theory in three important ways.

• trait and psychodynamic theory assume that the way we think about ourselves drives our social interaction whereas interpersonal theory assumes that our social interaction drives how we think about ourselves (others teach us how to think about ourselves).
• trait and psychodynamic theory define maturity as self-understanding whereas interpersonal theory defines maturity as the ability to interact productively with others (i.e., as social skill).
• trait and psychodynamic theory ignore reputation, whereas interpersonal theory assumes that establishing and maintaining one’s reputation is crucial for a productive life.

Socioanalytic Theory

Our perspective on personality theory, socioanalytic theory, integrates interpersonal theory with evolutionary psychology. Socioanalytic theory makes three major assumptions:

• people always live in groups, and every group has a status hierarchy and a religion;
• the goals of life concern getting along, getting ahead, and finding meaning;
• the goal of assessment is to predict individual differences in the ability to get along, get ahead, and find meaning.

There are huge individual differences in peoples’ ability to get along, get ahead, and find meaning and there are huge payoffs in terms of fitness for being able to do so.

Evolutionary Theory

Evolutionary theory tells us that life is about competition. There is competition at the individual level (within groups) for status, power, and social acceptance; this competition is driven by sexual selection (Ridley, 1991). Then there is competition between groups for territory, market share, political dominance, and ultimately survival. Warfare drives human evolution at the group level (Turchin, 2006).

There are major individual differences in the ability of individuals to compete for status, and there are major differences in the abilities of groups to compete for survival (e.g., the Rohingya). Although psychologists focus almost exclusively on within-group competition, between group competition is more consequential. What is good for the individual may or may not be good for the group. Free riders—rent seekers who enjoy the benefits of group living without contributing to its maintenance and functioning—represent one such example (Cornes, 1986). On the other hand, what is good for the group is usually good for the members. Success at within-group competition is a function of social skill, which includes the ability to get along with others (to avoid expulsion from the group) and to get ahead (to maximize one’s resources). Success in between-group competition is a function of leadership.

Socioanalytic theory concerns predicting and explaining effectiveness of both individuals and groups.

Individual Effectiveness

Within-group competition takes place during social interaction—interaction is where the action is. In order to interact, people need an agenda for the interaction and they need roles to play. Overt agendas vary across interactions, but the covert agenda for most interactions concern negotiations for belonging and status. Three components of personality shape interactions: identity, reputation, and social skill. Our identities are the generic roles we take with us to each interaction; they determine the roles we play and how we play them. After every interaction there is an accounting process and people gain or lose a little bit of status; our reputations reflect the outcome of this accounting process. Reputations are inherently evaluative and indicate how well we are doing in the process of within-group competition. Social skill is what translates identity into reputation. Dysfunctional people choose maladaptive identities, create bad reputations for themselves, and lack the social skill needed to change the cycle. Competent people use their social skill to create reputations that match their identities and maximize their social and economic wellbeing.

Group Effectiveness

Chimpanzee troops engage in genocide, ancient humans engaged in genocide, Native Americans practiced genocide—human history is a record of constant warfare. The Old Testament of the Bible is full of suggestions of the following variety: “When you capture a city, put to the sword all the men in it…utterly destroy them…save alive nothing that breatheth…As for the women and children, you may take them as plunder for yourselves” (Deuteronomy 2:10- 20). In the history of our species, if your tribe was overrun by another tribe, your opportunities for reproductive success ended abruptly. This is the reason we believe between-group competition trumps within-group competition. Success at within-group competition means nothing if you lose the between-group competition.

It seems clear that the success of armies, athletic teams, business enterprises, universities, religious organizations—any collective activity—depends on the leadership of that collectivity. But from WWII until the early 1980s, academic psychology thought individual differences in the talent for leadership was a myth, that leadership was situational, and if you were successful in a leadership role, you were just lucky. As of today, there is still no consensus regarding the characteristics of competent leaders.

In our view, the academic study of leadership suffers from five major problems:

• the wrong definition of leadership;
• no attention to the consequences of leadership;
• no attention to the subordinates’ view of leadership;
• no attention to derailment;
• no attention to personality.

Progress is being made, but these issues remain salient. We now take them up in turn.

Defining Leadership

Most research defines leadership in terms of the people at the top of organizations. But who gets to the top of large, hierarchical, bureaucratic, male-dominated organizations? People with good political skills who win the within-group competition for status. A meta-analysis of leader personality (i.e., the personality of people in leadership roles) indicates that leaders tend to score low on Neuroticism and high on Extraversion, Openness, and Conscientiousness (Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002). Clearly these individuals have talent for acquiring status. But, do they have any talent for leading their groups to success?

An alternative view of leadership, and one that we prefer, is to define leadership from the perspective of group effectiveness. For the most part, people are biologically wired to behave selfishly (Dawkins, 1976). However, people are also capable of altruism when altruism (a) serves their long-term self-interest or (b) promotes the interests of those sharing their genetic material (Fletcher & Doebeli, 2008; Hamilton, 1964a, b; Nowak, Tarnita, & Wilson, 2010; Trivers, 1971). Further, the history of human warfare and modern team sports indicates that cohesive and coordinated groups outperform disorganized groups. Thus, in our view, the primary goal of leadership is to persuade people to temporarily set aside their selfish desires for the good of the group. In this view, leadership should be evaluated on the basis of the group’s performance, not on the basis of one’s ability to gain leadership positions. Politicians are skilled at gaining leadership positions; effective leaders are skilled at building and maintaining high-performing teams.

Researchers are finally beginning to understand that the leadership of an organization has consequences for the members of the organizations. If leadership is about building teams, then it is important to know how the teams react to the leadership to which they are exposed. The team members are the consumers of leadership and will react accordingly. Employee engagement can be easily assessed using survey methodology. Over the past 20 years, overwhelming evidence shows that employee engagement predicts every significant organizational outcome, positive or negative, including absenteeism, turnover, productivity, quality, and customer service ratings. The lower the engagement levels, the worse the outcomes, the higher the engagement levels the better the outcomes (Harter, Schmidt, & Hayes, 2002). But most importantly for this discussion, the personalities of the managers create the engagement levels of their staff. And, on average, what do those personalities look like? The news is not encouraging.

Incompetent Leadership

Consider the following from various lines of survey research. A recent survey of the UK public indicated that 22% of people hate their boss, 52% of people name their boss as their main cause of dissatisfaction, 20% would forgo a pay raise if someone would fire their boss, and an astonishing 12% of respondents admit to having imagined killing their boss (Whitfield, 2018). In a similar US survey, 65% of Americans say they would prefer getting rid of their boss to receiving a pay raise (Casserly, 2012). On this basis, we estimate that 65% to 75% of managers in the U. S. economy, public and private sector, are incompetent and alienate their subordinates.

Effective Leadership

There is little agreement in the academic research regarding effective leadership (i.e., the characteristics of people who can build and maintain high performing teams), though three lines of research converge to define effective leadership:

• Implicit leadership theory (Kouzes and Posner, 2008) – the theory is based on the assumption that, because leadership has been such an important factor in human history, people have a rough intuitive sense of the characteristics of good leaders.
• Research on emergent vs. effective managers (Luthans, Hodgetts, & Rosenkrantz, 1988) – emergent managers are regularly identified as high potential employees, while effective managers are overlooked because they do not stand out and play organizational politics. It is this process of promoting emergent managers, and overlooking effective managers, that creates the high rate of managerial failure in corporate affairs.
• Research on organizational effectiveness (Collins, 2001) – the CEO personality is what matters, not the CEO itself.

Last Thoughts on Personality Psychology

Career success (the result of within-group competition) and organizational effectiveness (the result of between-group competition) are the most crucial issues in life. How can personality psychology help people have more successful careers? Mostly by creating strategic self-awareness and eliminating self-defeating behavior. How can personality psychology help organizations become more effective? Mostly by helping them hire effective leaders.

* Article provided by courtesy of Hogan Assessment